The Homa Files

A recent Rasmussen survey asked likely voters:

“Suppose you could vote this fall on whether to get rid of the entire Congress and start over again.
Would you vote to keep the entire Congress or get rid of the entire Congress? “

The survey said:

25% Keep the entire Congress
57% Get rid of the entire Congress
18% Not sure

70% of independents said they would vote to replace all of the elected politicians in the House and Senate.

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Some drill down diagnostics:

74% trust their own economic judgment more than Congress’.

67% are NOT Confident that Congress knows what its doing on economy

59% think that members of Congress are overpaid

54% do NOT think that members of Congress understand legislation that they vote on

42% think that a group selected from the phone book would do a better job

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Interesting background:

More than 90% of Congress routinely gets reelected every two years.

When the Constitution was written, the nation’s founders expected that there would be a 50% turnover in the House of Representatives every election cycle since that was the experience they witnessed in state legislatures at the time.

For well over 100 years after the Constitution was adopted, the turnover averaged in the 50% range as expected.

In the 20th century, starting with the New Deal era, turnover began to decline.

In 1968, congressional turnover fell to single digits for the first time ever, and it has remained very low ever since.

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Source: Rasmussen, “57% Would Like to Replace Entire Congress”,  August 30, 2009:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/august_2009/57_would_like_to_replace_entire_congress

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This entry was posted on September 2, 2009 at 7:59 am and is filed under Congress - Senate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.